Topic: Who are the people in your neighborhood: Digital Persona Experience
Keisha (Pittman) McKinney lives in South Arkansas with her husband and sweet Boxer, Bailey and her new little man! Keisha is passionate about connecting people and building community, seeking solutions to the everyday big and small things, and encouraging others through the mundane, hard, and typical that life often brings. She put her communications background to work as a former Non-profit Executive Director, college recruiter and fundraiser, and Digital Media Director at a large church in Northwest Arkansas. Now she is using all of those experiences as Founder of Arkansas Influencers, a social media marketing talent agency, McKinney Media Solutions and her blog @bigpittstop which includes daily adventures, cooking escapades, #bigsisterchats, the social justice cases on her heart, and all that she is learning as a #boymom!
How did you get involved in WordPress?
Well, I connected with WordPress when I transferred my blog over a couple years ago. I had been a blogger gal for 8 years when I originally started writing. But, everything was moving to WordPress and as it became the premier blog platform, I knew I needed to be part of the conversation and get on board with the capabilities and ways WordPress could help me grow my business.
What do you do with WordPress?
Currently, I’m a website owner. I have a personal blog and I’m Owner/Founder of Arkansas Influencers, an online community and talent agency for Social Media Influencers in Arkansas. I also do freelance work through my own business McKinney Media Solutions.
What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?
Whoa, this community is amazing. I love how supportive everyone is. It seems like we are all still navigating some new territory and learning and teaching each other. It’s a pretty special place. Yes, people are interested in making money off what they’ve learned and that is happening through theme and plugin development. But, I love that this community is about mutual support and sharing what they are learning. The Trailblazers and early adopters stick their necks out there and learn what they can to bring the rest of us along. I think we are seeing this right now with Gutenberg and experienced it earlier this year with the GDPR. Without a web development background, it’s so easy to just want to throw in the towel and give up, but this community keeps us coming along. It’s a mutually beneficial space.
Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?
I love learning and being a part of this WordCamp community. I think so many times we get lost in the building of the website that we forget there are other processes and platforms that integrate with what we do to actually built the “site space” that our website lives on. As business owners (yes, I’m thinking of bloggers, freelancers, developers, and actual business owners) we have so many parts and moving pieces to think about. One of those is marketing and actually getting people to show up. My background and experience is in “all the other things” and I’m learning more and more how to get people to the table to talk about them. I’m not the technical gal, but I love community and creating community around really great content.
Why did you decide to speak on your topic?
As I mentioned above, I love community. We spend so much time wmaking really great content and putting in our website. We make content we really think needs to be out there. I like to ask a couple questions. Is that the content the person we are trying to reach wants to read? And, do we know who the person is that is coming to our website or that we want to come to our website. Persona, Avatar, Blue Person – we hear all these terms, but do we really know who this person is? “Who are the people in your neighborhood” will be a super practical, highly interactive session where we explore the visitors we are attracting and compare that to the person we want to be inviting to the party and will walk through a tool to discover how they use the internet and what that means for us.
What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?
I want the audience to walk away with a tool they can take that evening and apply directly to their website. I love a good walk away and “first step” when I get home from a conference and I hope this session will be one of those. We will look at 2 specific things during our session – who is our audience, who do we want to be our audience and then explore how they consume media and where we fit in to that picture.